Burger king bastards

Today Katie had a friend over for dinner, they both wanted a burger and chips for dinner so Kelly went to Burger king...

Those of you who know me in real life or through facebook will know I have been trying to reform my grumpy, angry and nasty attitude, and it was going so well, but this afternoon that fragile peace was smashed into a million pieces, and I was left with a twitching eyelid that wouldn't have looked out of place of the face of a serial killer from a Hollywood blockbuster.

This is the letter I am sending them (complete with the pictures) in the hope that they will compensate me with thousands of pounds.



Dear Burger King,

Good morning, I'd like to start this letter with a short quiz.

Here's your starter for 10.

1) When was the last major potato shortage?

2) How much does a large potato cost?

3) Can you see where this letter might be heading?

Right, time's up, please stop writing and put down your crayons (if you haven't eaten them already)

How did you get on? The answers are (1) I don't care (2) less than 10 pence, but still I don't care and finally (3) Your portion sizes.

My daughter had a friend over today after school, they had both been very good so the wife and I decided to treat them to a burger and chips from your Ely (Cambridgeshire) restaurant. As soon as the kids mentioned Burger King I phoned up the Royal bank of Scotland and released a chunk of equity to pay for our meal. The wife headed off to grab the food while I waited at home for our tasty bounty to return home.

First of all I'd like to say that the staff in the Ely restaurant were very polite and accommodating, however if it came down to some form of challenge involving your restaurant making 4 simple meals and a snail merrily wending its way from Lands end to John O'Groats, I know which one I'd put my money on winning.

Now let's get down to the order and meal....

1 x Hamburger meal (kids)
1 x Cheeseburger meal (kids)
1 x Chicken burger meal (kids)
and finally
1 x ***LARGE*** Double whopper meal

Let me point out at this stage that £18.36 for that small order is daylight robbery, the wife looked around the car park for a policeman so she could report the fact she'd just been mugged, sadly there was none to hand.

To give some scale of the enormous price you charge I decided to turn to charity as an example of how steep the cost of your meals actually is.

For around the same money I could:

Send an entire tool kit to Eritrea to dig and build a well
or
Supply 10 x rainwater collection systems
or
4 monthly contributions to MAGPAS/AIR AMBULANCE
or
130 Polio vaccinations
or finally
73 Meningitis vaccines.

I was so disgusted with the cost that I have donated the equivalent of the price of the meal to Oxfam, I wonder if you're willing to match it?

The meals were so small that if they'd been sent to a third world country they would probably have had to ask for second helpings, sadly that's not something you offer the poor mugs that you call customers.

The thing that pissed me off the most was the size of my portion of fries...... I pulled the carton out of the bag and immediately accused the children of having stolen my large portion of fries. However upon closer inspection all of the kids meals had a paper bag for their chips.



I decided I had to investigate my meagre portion of chips, so I poured them into the lid of my burger box, took off my shoes and socks and began to count...... 16, 17, 18, 19.....Done, as in both finished counting and robbed. I'd reached the last chip and there was still a little piggy left over that could go wee wee wee wee wee all the way home!

19 bastard chips, NINETEEN! it doesn't matter how you write it, it still looks like far too few for a LARGE meal! I at least expected to have to count on my 6th toe when I got past 20, but I couldn't even do that!

Most of the fries were incredibly small too, most of them lucky to make 2" it was like they were suffering from some form of starch based dwarfism!It was more like potato shavings than French fries!

I did however have one chip that must have been AT LEAST 4 inches long, I named him Gulliver, he was like a giant among a village of tiny lilliputians.

To say I was disappointed is an understatement.

This brings me to the next item on my agenda..... Napkins, I'm not sure how many trees had to die for the ridiculous amount of napkins we were given, but suffice to say that if they had been dumped in the middle of the BP oil spill of 2010 it would have averted a catastrophic wildlife issue that killed millions of animals.

We received 7 portions of Ketchup, which when you consider the fact that we had around 70 chips between the 4 of us it constitutes a massive condiment overload. 3 Sachets of mayo were also included, which seemed far more sensible.

We also received 1 packet of salt between the 4 of us, now I fully understand that too much salt is bad for you, but this is just plain silly, as we counted out the individual grains and passed them round we could only speculate on why we got so little salt.

My theory is that you've signed a lucrative deal with the highways agency to provide salt for the annual winter road gritting in East Anglia and are therefore rationing the amount given out in your restaurants.

I will say this, the food tasted amazing, and although I am sitting here still hungry (lack of chips, in case you hadn't guessed) and as we finished our food (around 12 seconds after we started) we reached for the finger wipes.

Given the shortage of chips and salt, and the wealth of Ketchup and napkins it was going to be like watching the lottery numbers being selected one by one, such was our anticipation. At this point the excitement was too much and my wife dove into the bag, as her hand slowly raised from the deepest recess of the bag I waited, open mouthed.......

1 fucking finger wipe..... 1 fucking wipe, between 4 of us......You've got to be joking right?

Get fucked.

Dave Powell.

Is that a Teletubby?

Sometimes you see something that is so incredible, so out of the ordinary that it makes you stop dead in your tracks and ask “Did that really just happen?”. You look at whoever you happen to be with and sort of mouth the words “whathefuck???” and in return you receive a vacant expression from your conversation counterpart.

Well this very situation arose the other day at Drayton manor theme park. Kelly, the kids and I met up with John Senior, his wife Lynsey and their boys Owen and Devon. A good day was had by all and as we wandered our way around the park we took in the sights and sounds of Staffordshire and the wide variety of errrrrr... interesting people the place has to offer.

We saw tall people, short people, foreign people, English people, fat people, thin people.... and then we saw a fucking human version of a teletubby! I shit you not, this  lady looked exactly like La La from the television program that makes you want to have seizures and gouge your own eyes out with a rusty teaspoon.

She was wearing a full on yellow outfit, head to toe custard, she looked like the third member of banana’s in pyjama’s and unluckily for her John had spotted her and the furnace of his imagination was cooking up something terrible! “LOOK, IT’S A TELETUBBY!” now John’s not the quietest or most subtle of people at the best of times, but it appeared that all of the rides stopped, and every child ceased crying all at once and the comment carried on the breeze like a Chinese lantern.

Thankfully I don’t think she spoke English so a bullet was most definitely dodged at this point, but this was just a sideshow to the main attraction of the day.

The Pokemon incident.

I have written and rewritten this piece about the Pokemon situation, and no matter how I write it I cannot adequately convey the awesomeness of what we witnessed. It is something that I would find hard to top, it will remain top of my weirdshitometer list for a long time to come. And unless I happen to see Zippy from rainbow riding on John Major’s back whilst shooting apples off of a Dalek’s head with a crossbow it will never be toppled.

Ok, so here we go....

We decided to head over to the Zoo area of Drayton manor, we all wanted to make sure we took in as much of the park as possible and they had some pretty cool animals in there, my favourite was the Black Panther, although this was soon topped by a chance encounter with a real life pokemon master and his Squirtle Pokemon.

Now I appreciate not everyone will know who Squirtle is, or what Pokemon is either, so allow me to briefly explain. Pokemon was/is a cartoon and media franchise, it is based around a pokemon master named Ash and he owns and tends to a list of creatures named Pokemon. They vary from turtles to triffid like plants that fire razor sharp leaves at their opponent.

So we’ve just walked out of the reptile centre and are stood outside, when we happen to spy a foreign lad, probably about 14 or 15 years of age. He was at the fence of the monkey enclosure leaning over the fence and antagonising the poor primates inside. He kept stretching his hand out to hold theirs and then would pull his hand back at the last second.

Well we immediately started talking about him behind his back, comments such as ‘I hope the monkey tears one of his fingers off’ and ‘I hope the monkey eats his face’ were quick to emerge, and although this would have been awesome it wouldn’t have been a patch on what happened next...

Man: “OI YOU!”
Boy looks around startled.
Man: “Get away from that fence, leave those monkeys alone!”
Boy looks confused
Man: “I am so angry with you I can’t even speak right now!”

This may not seem out of the ordinary, but when we looked at the angry zookeeper it just got better and better, He was charging towards our little startled foreign monkey teasing friend WITH A 3 FOOT LONG TURTLE IN HIS HANDS! I shit you not, it was so surreal I was lost for words. 
















All I could picture was the man screaming at the top of his voice “Squirtle, I choose you!” and throwing the shelled superhero in the boys face. He was marching closer and closer and we hoped against hope that he’d let the Turtle maul the lads face off, however it was not meant to be. The foreign lad trotted off looking suitably startled and we were trying hard not to piss ourselves with laughter in case we were angry turtle mans next victims.


The hedgehog devil.

Well, I was going to leave it there, but last night we ordered pizza for dinner, the kids were crying about me not feeding them and I hadn't eaten in the last hour. We ordered from a shop in Ely and chose to have it delivered.

After about 40 minutes there was a knock at the door, followed by a shuffling scurrying type noise from outside. I went to the door and the delivery driver was stood at the far end of the pathway with a look of terror in his eyes. Immediately I expected to be mauled from my left by a pack of rabid geese, or ripped in half by Godzilla, but there was nothing there.

Me: "Are you ok mate?"

Driver: "What is this, WHAT IS IT???"

Me: "What are you talking about mate?"

Driver: "That THAT THAT THING!"

At this point he jabbed a gnarled finger in the direction of my front garden, I strained my eyes trying to make out the terror that lay in wait for me.

Me: "It's a fucking hedgehog mate, It won't hurt you!"

Driver: "Are you sure?"

Me: "Pretty sure pal"

Driver: "ok that'll be £21.20 please"

I pay the man, and as I close the door I can't help but remember how much I love being a rude bastard......

Me: "And don't fucking eat it"

With that I closed the door, smiled to myself and ate a pizza the size of a dustbin lid.


Goodnight all :)